November 17, 2023 - January 26, 2024
Installation Views | Essay | For availability and pricing, call 212-581-1657.
Installation Views
D. Wigmore Fine Art presents Sun, Sea and Doris Lee, an exhibition of over thirty paintings by ten artists that show their creative responses to different aspects of Florida. The artists in our exhibition are Doris Lee (1904-1983), Virginia Berresford (1904-1995), Francis Chapin (1899-1965), Adolf Dehn (1895-1968), Lucy L’Engle (1889-1978), Witold Gordon (1885-1968), Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), Frederick Dana Marsh (1872-1961), Jan Matulka (1890-1972), and Sally Michel Avery (1902-2003)
We have singled out Doris Lee as she fell under Florida’s spell on her first visit in 1940. She purchased a home in Key West in 1941 and with her husband, Arnold Blanch, spent January through April each year in Florida. Blanch taught at New York’s Art Students League and in art programs across Florida. Birds, fishermen and bathers by Blanch and Lee add joy to this exhibition. As artist-in-residence at the Research Studio in Maitland, Florida, Lee developed a friendship with Milton and Sally Avery who also spent the winters of 1950 and 1951 there. A Sally Michel bather and a floral still life stand out in the exhibition. Watercolors by Virginia Berresford reflect her interest in the intense light and shadow found in Florida’s exotic flora and fauna and underwater with coral and fish. Berresford wintered in Florida from 1934 to 1950 in Miami and then Key West where her husband was stationed at Fort Taylor during World War II. Lucy L’Engle, one of Provincetown’s modernists, painted a palm frond she used as a fan in St. Augustine. Reginald Marsh visited Ormond Beach regularly after his father, Frederick Dana Marsh, retired there in 1928. We feature Reginald Marsh’s portrait of “The Battleship,” his father’s Ormond Beach house named for its streamlined modern architecture. In the foreground Marsh includes the carousel horses on the lawn that they rescued from the town dump. A real find in our exhibition is Dana Marsh’s plan for a mural in the “The Battleship,” which features different Florida Indians and a notation that Doris Lee liked the design. Several ocean and beachside subjects by Adolf Dehn speak of changeable Florida weather with a hurricane approaching Palm Beach, as well as paintings in which mists or sunny bird life are seen along the coast. We hope Sun, Sea and Doris Lee will bring you some sunshine.